On de Sitter future-past extremal surfaces and the "entanglement wedge"

Abstract: We develop further the codim-2 future-past extremal surfaces stretching between the future and past boundaries in de Sitter space, discussed in previous work. We first make more elaborate the construction of such surfaces anchored at more general subregions of the future boundary, and stretching to equivalent subregions at the past boundary. These top-bottom symmetric future-past extremal surfaces cannot penetrate beyond a certain limiting surface in the Northern/Southern diamond regions: the boundary subregions become the whole boundary for this limiting surface. For multiple disjoint subregions, this construction leads to mutual information vanishing and strong subadditivity being saturated. We then discuss an effective codim-1 envelope surface arising from these codim-2 surfaces. This leads to analogs of the entanglement wedge and subregion duality for these future-past extremal surfaces in de Sitter space.